One can choose how much credibility to give to subjective analyses. That said, "scoring" that is retrospective is generally objective. What's important there is understanding what goes into that score.
For OSTIX risk, M* and Lipper are in pretty close agreement, i.e. their different scoring systems in this case lead to the similar conclusions. Risk has been low but slightly increasing in recent years. You can see this in M*'s 3 year risk rating (below average) vs. its 5 and ten year risk ratings for the fund (low).
Lipper represents risk differently. It uses "Preservation" to represent downside risk. (Here's its
methodology.) On preservation OSTIX has been very solid - 4 or 5 over all timeframes. (Dropping from a 5 rating over five years to 4 over three years, tracking M* over these periods.)
MAXFunds rates OSTIX's risk at
1(low) on a scale of
1-5. But it isn't clear whether that is relative to the fund universe or to HY funds.
All these sources seem to concur that OSTIX is a low risk fund. This despite the relatively low credit rating (B vs. BB for some HY funds) that the fund sports. This supports the M*assessment that the credit rating in this case doesn't accurately represent the risk in the fund.
At least some of that risk control may be coming from its bipolar approach to credit - around 20% AAA, over 20% in cash, and nearly all the rest in really low grade stuff (B or below). It's like a
barbell approach, but a barbell on credit quality, not duration.
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FWIW, here's MFO's review of fund sites as of five years ago:
http://www.mutualfundobserver.com/2012/03/march-2012-mutual-fund-rating-sites/Also a thread about one of the sites it liked, FundReveal.
http://mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/2441/fund-reveal-please-try-it-outThat's a pay-only site, and apparently it's tripled its fees in the past five years, from $
100-$
150 to $495 and up.
